Word: torun
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...reduced to privates--are on trial for last October's abduction and murder of Father Jerzy Popieluszko, a priest who was an unyielding supporter of the banned Solidarity trade-union movement. As Piotrowski took the witness stand last week in Room 40 of the courthouse in the city of Torun, many expected the ex-captain to confirm the prosecution's original claim that the slaying was carried out with the knowledge and support of high-ranking members of the Internal Affairs Ministry, which oversees the secret police. But although he said that at one time he had mistakenly believed...
...helicopter hovered overhead, dozens of policemen set up barricades, blocking the approaches to the yellow brick courthouse on Piekarska Street in the provincial city of Torun, 100 miles northwest of Warsaw. The strict security precautions seemed grimly ironic, considering the fact that the four men who were brought to trial in handcuffs last week were, like the policemen outside, employees of the Ministry of the Interior. The four, all secret policemen, are charged in the plot to abduct and murder Father Jerzy Popieluszko, 37, a Roman Catholic priest who was an outspoken supporter of the banned Solidarity trade union...
When Father Jerzy Popieluszko, 37, was abducted on a lonely stretch of road outside the city of Torun on Oct. 19, many Poles refused to believe that the popular priest could have been the victim of gangland-style violence. During the grimmest hours of military rule, Popieluszko's eloquence and passionate dedication had offered hope to many Poles that the spirit of Solidarity, the banned trade-union movement, would somehow survive. But each passing day brought new revelations of involvement by the secret police in a plot to silence Popieluszko. Hope for the priest's safe return soon...
...diatribe had apparently been sparked by a strong trend in the Polish party toward "horizontal" contacts among local party cells, a heretical reversal of the Leninist principle of "democratic centralism," by which power flows down from the Central Committee. That movement, born at a meeting of party dissidents in Torun on April 15, is now active in 40 of Poland's 49 provinces. In his speech before the Central Committee, Kania conspicuously refrained from attacking the Torun movement. While he warned that the party's "historically tested Leninist construction" must not be undermined, Kania described the Torun initiative...
...measures did not satisfy the representatives of the Torun group who had gone to Warsaw to monitor the Central Committee plenum. Said one of their spokesmen: "We're not concerned with approaching democracy. We're concerned with democracy now." But that expression of impatience was itself an indication of how far Poland had come along the road to democracy. Where else, under Moscow's dominion, could one imagine the spectacle of government representatives sitting down with members of an independent trade union and treating them as equal bargaining partners? What other Communist government would endorse a legislative...